Ruling on Diocese's Privacy May Open Flood of Material
By SAM DILLON
ver the nine years since Leland White sued the Roman\
Catholic church in Rhode Island seeking damages, asserting that his parish priest sexually abused him in 1970, eight other men have
lodged similar accusations against the same priest, who has pleaded guilty to criminal abuse charges. But the Diocese of
Providence has given little quarter.
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Citing its First Amendment religious rights, the diocese has
refused to turn over thousands of documents requested by
Mr. White and nearly 40 other Catholics who have sued the
Rhode Island church, saying they were abused by priests. For
nearly a decade, the courts have upheld the church.
But that appeared to change this week when a state justice,
citing the American bishops' acknowledgment last month at their
meeting in Dallas that the church's culture of secrecy had hurt the
church and its flock, ruled that the First Amendment could not be
construed as a blanket shield protecting the church from requests
for information in inquiries into priestly assaults on children.
"By no elastic stretch of the most fertile imagination can one
rationally conclude that such information or any such communication
deserves or merits confidentiality as expressions of religious
freedom," Justice Robert D. Krause of State Superior Court wrote
in his ruling, issued on Monday.
Lawyers for people who say they have been abused by priests in Rhode
Island and across the nation called Justice Krause's ruling a watershed in
one of the longest and hardest-fought legal cases provoked by priestly
sexual misconduct. It underlined the way the American bishops' self-criticism
and pledges of more open policies on sex abuse, made at their June meeting
in Dallas, continue to reverberate, even in the court system.
"Judges are telling the church to stop wasting our time by coming here and trying
to use the First Amendment to defend the indefensible," said Sylvia Demarest,
a lawyer who won a $31 million sex abuse settlement from the Diocese of
Dallas in 1997 and was studying Justice Krause's ruling yesterday.
Mr. White, 46, of Arlington, Va., said in an interview that he was abused
by the Rev. James Silva, his parish priest in Newport, R.I., in 1970, when he
was 14. Father Silva, Mr. White said, befriended him, asked him to help answer
the phones one night late at the rectory, then requested that he stay overnight
and crawled into bed with him.
After Mr. White sued Father Silva, Bishop Louis E. Gelineau and the Diocese
of Providence in 1993, several other men stepped forward to say they had also
been abused by Father Silva, one of them so recently that the criminal statute
of limitations had not expired. Father Silva was charged and pleaded guilty in
1995 to sexual abuse. The diocese has barred Father Silva from exercising his
ministerial duties, but Karen Davis, a spokeswoman for the diocese, said she
could not immediately specify when.
Mr. White is one of nearly 40 Catholics who have sued the Diocese of Providence
saying that they were abused by Father Silva and at least nine other Rhode
Island priests. Their suits have been consolidated before one judge. They have
sought fruitlessly for a decade to gain access to diocesan documents that church
officials have routinely handed over in similar suits elsewhere in the legal process
called discovery.
"I don't know of any case around the country where so many victims have been
in court for so long and gotten so little," said David Clohessy, the St. Louis school
administrator who is national director of the Survivors Network for People Abused
by Priests.
William T. Murphy, a lawyer for the Diocese of Providence, did not say whether he
intended to appeal Justice Krause's ruling. He said it was too early to measure the
effect because, he said, the justice left unclear whether he intended it to be applied
only to documents the plaintiffs might request in the future, or retroactively to many
documents a previous judge had already ruled that the church did not have to turn
over to the plaintiffs. The church has resisted turning over documents to the plaintiffs
in some cases in the consolidated lawsuit, Mr. Murphy said, to protect the privacy
of Rhode Island Catholics who have given the church confidential information about
abusive priests.
"This ruling raises more questions than it answers because it didn't say anything
about these prior orders," Mr. Murphy said.
But Tim Conlon, a Providence lawyer who represents 32 of the Rhode Island plaintiffs,
said the ruling was anything but ambiguous.
"This is a watershed breakthrough in terms of our ability to get documents and
information," Mr. Conlon said. "In Rhode Island the Catholic Church has made it its
business to clog the discovery process with complex legal arguments about why
information should not be produced and has avoided releasing actual information."
In his order, Justice Krause cited a document written by the United States Conference
of Bishops in Dallas, the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, in
which the bishops acknowledged that "secrecy has created an atmosphere that
has inhibited the healing process and in some cases enabled sexually abusive
behavior to be repeated."
He cited the Bishops' Charter to illustrate how public understanding of the church's
handling of sex abuse accusations has changed rapidly, obligating everyone,
including the courts, to re-evaluate long-held postures.
"Circumstances have indeed changed," he wrote. "The church hierarchy became
publicly embroiled in a nationwide clamor for reform and for public disclosure of
matters relating to priests who sexually assault children. Insistence upon
disclosure emanated not only from those not associated with the church, but
indeed from bishops within the church as well."
Pureheart